"TWENTY-YEAR-OLD: I gotta girl, she's always asking me to marry her. So I look at that face, and I say to myself: "Could I stand looking at that face for the resta my life?""

"Most movies, even the good ones, are based upon the extraordinary incident and the exceptional character. In writing the stage play, it is necessary to contrive exciting moments of theater. Marty and The Mother are bundled together in one discussion because each represents in its own way the sort of material that does best on television. They both deal with the world of the mundane, the ordinary, and the untheatrical. The main characters are typical, rather than exceptional; the situations are easily identifiable by the audience; and the relationships are as common as people. The essence of these two shows lies in their literal reality. I tried to write the dialogue as if it had been wire-tapped. I tried to envision the scenes as if a camera had been focused upon the unsuspecting characters and had caught them in an untouched moment of life."

"I used to adore my old man because he was always so kind. That's one of the most beautiful things I have in my life — the way my father and mother were. And my father was a real ugly man. So it doesn't matter if you look like a gorilla. You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are."

"It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much."

"CANTOR: And ye shall know Him in the strangest costumes and in the strangest places."

"MR FAULKNER: Give the facts a good look in the face, John."

"MR HEALY: Are the people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago? Are they happier? This is the great American disease, boy! This passion for machines. Everybody is always inventing labor-saving devices. What's wrong with labor? A man's work is the sweetest thing he owns. It would do us a lot better to invent some labor-making devices. We've gone mad, boy, with this mad chase for comfort, and it's sure we're losing the very juice of living. BOY: The world changes, Mister Healy. The old things go, and each of us must make peace with the new."

"DAUGHTER: Life doesn't dovetail so nicely . . ."

"...everyone knows they're going to die, but no one really believes it."

"How do you do! My name is Sue! Now you gonna die!"

"Rollin' Stone, Wanna see my picture on the cover. Wanna buy five copies for my mother [Yeah!] Wanna see my smilin' face, on the cover, The cover of the Rollin Stone."

"If you have to dry the dishes (Such an awful boring chore) If you have to dry the dishes ('Stead of going to the store) If you have to dry the dishes And you drop one on the floor Maybe they won't let you Dry the dishes anymore"

"Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy."

"Once I spoke the language of the flowers, Once I understand each word the caterpillar said, Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings, And shared a conversation with the housefly in my bed."

"When the light turns green, you go. When the light turns red, you stop. But what do you do when the light turns blue with orange and lavender spots?"

"There's a Polar Bear In our Frigidaire - He likes it 'cause it's cold in there."

"If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time."

"People who are intolerant, categorize and over-react... should all be dragged against a wall and shot."

"Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker."

"One of those monstrosities that nature so cruelly inflicts upon her world, like a two headed calf or a servant with ginger eyebrows."

"A servant is the true reflection of his master."

"One cannot restrain a dancing cow."

"The waves round the horn will toss us to and fro, to and fro like a rubber duckie in the bathtub of an angry God."

"I thought I would try my hand at sailing. It was too small and kept sinking, so I decided to try a boat instead."

"I hate whales. I hate them. I can’t stand those stupid, blubbery, floating around, self-indulgent smug-faced krill-eating fat jerks with all their sycophantic hippie save-the- planet peacenik eco-terrorist generation X-er groupies. Greenpeace? Get a job!"

"What about what he lives for, Squire? Isn't that the true measure of a man, what he lives for?"

"You can't make cheese from rats. … It's hard enough just milking the little beggars."

"I said I'd make ye a man, Jim - but damme if ye didn't go and do it behind my back when I were watching elsewhere."

"Don’t be afraid, my Lord. My father always says that fear is the devil’s hairbrush, although no one knows quite what he means by it."

"You'll find, young Jim, that there are two measures of a man. Only two. What he will die for...and what he will kill for. You made your choice aboard the Hispaniola."

"The answer is what the answer always is, that we are animals, that at the end we turn on each other, tearing each other apart. To survive. Throw Lubov to the men in the guard shack like a scrap of meat to a pack of wolves... why not, it is for survival. Fight, kill each other, over the warmth of the stove? Of course - it is survival. I refuse to survive. But I will live."

"Don't cook that chicken - it still has feathers."

"Just because you’re living in blissful oblivion doesn’t mean you’re not responsible."

"Spending the day with you has been marginally better than watching mother die of cancer."

"The only thing that matters is what you do now, here."

"Marriage is the safe harbor men proffer from a tempest they themselves conjure into creation."

"No offense to your father, Jim, but let's face it—the man's dead. Dead, dead, dead. Moldering in the ground, being eaten by worms, and...what's that kind of fly that lays its eggs in rotting meat? You know the ones, little white maggots wriggling everywhere. Those."

"Every battle, every war - is fought for things worth dying for."

"Get me a drink, or I'll tell you I love you. I'll wake you up in an hour or two, crooning, all sloppy and maudlin, tell you I love you really. You'd like that, right? Hearing Momma tell you she loves you? Isn't that what you want, deep inside?"

"You know they're all gay, right? … Male strippers. Fruity as cake. Queer as a cardinal."

"Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus, and it's hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy, and more than anything else in the world, you wanna get off. And the only reason in the world you don't get off is it's still fifty blocks from where you're going. Well, I can get off right now if I want to. Because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it's still the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. Whenever I've had enough, it's my stop. I've had enough."

"I found an old baby picture of me... and it was somebody else - not me. It was somebody pink and fat. Who never heard of sick or lonely. Somebody who cried and got fed. And reached up and got held. Slept whenever she wanted to just by closing her eyes. Somebody who mainly just laid there and laughed at the colors waving over, round her head. And chewed on a polka-dot whale. And woke up knowing some new trick nearly every day. Rolled over and drooled on a sheet. Felt your hand pull the quilt back up over me. That's who I started out. And this is who's left."

"I'm who I was waiting for. I didn't make it."

"...life is lonely, life is empty. Love isn't everything. A dear true friend is more than love--the serge outlasts the silk."

"Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries."

"I believe in the vast potentialities of mankind. But I see everywhere a wide disparity between what they can be and what they are. That is what I want to say in writing. I want to say the genius of the human race is mongrelized; I want to find out how mankind can be helped out of the animal kingdom into the clear sweet air."

"Boychick, wake up! Be something! Make your life something good. For the love of an old man who sees in your young days his new life, for such love take the world in your two hands and make it like new. Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills."

"Bash on regardless. That is the cry dear chap. Through the funerals of friends. Trampling the rose gardens of enemies. Bash on regardless."

""Why don't you shut up. You thief." Amazing how few words one has to use to gain one's desired effect."

"Love and affection calms the horse. Provided you can administer these before you are bitten, trampled or kicked to death. Meanwhile step back out of harm's way. Murmur quiet peaceful words. There, there now. Easy there. Quietly now. Good old fellow."